My Trip to the Dentist: from this past summer

So it had been a while since I the last time I had had my teeth cleaned and what with my wedding coming up and all I figured no time like the present. I’ve been living in New York full time for over five years and although I liked the dentist I’ve seen in the past his office is too far away and I find his secretary to be incompetent (they provide a reminder phone call the day before you’re scheduled appoint, in five years I have received exactly one reminder phone call, not a stellar track record…) so I decided to find a dentist closer to home. Luckily I live a short walk from the New York Methodist Hospital, a humongous compound that takes up an entire city block here in Brooklyn and as an added bonus is just across the street from my local Barnes and Nobel.

Unfortunately the only appointment they had was in the middle of the afternoon. As an overnight shift worker I’m typically asleep in the middle of the afternoon, but I figure I go in, my teeth get polished, baddabing, baddaboom, I’m outta there. My appoint rolls around, I’ve managed to grab a couple hours of sleep, and I hit the doors of the dentists office with a couple of minutes to spar. Trying to stay awake I read my book and wait for my name to be called. When it is I find myself following an Asian woman about my age while simultaneously contemplating the questionable decision I made when I chose to major in film. ‘People my age are dentists already? Really? Damn. I wonder what she makes.”

If you haven’t changed dentists before let me tell you they ask you a surprising amount of questions. All kinds of things… are you allergic to any medications? Does your family a history of cancer? Who’s your next of kin? And as we’re going along, slipped in there somewhere towards the end, she asks me, ‘Do you have a heart murmur?’ I’m half asleep and I sort of remember something about heart murmurs from the depths of my childhood and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah I think so.’ And instantly she starts asking me all these follow up questions and it becomes abundantly clear to me that if having a heart murmur means a whole lot more than that your heart makes a pleasant and relaxing murmuring sound, akin to a gentle stream, as I had supposed it did. It means special medications and antibiotics and I have never needed to follow any of these special procedures before going to the dentist so I correct myself but now the cat’s out of the bag and they won’t touch my teeth until I know for sure that I do not have a heart murmur. Great.

I get outside and call my mom and I ask her if I have a heart murmur and her response is of course, ‘No, dummy, why would you think you had a heart murmur?’ And then I remembered what it was… I was tested for a heart murmur waaay back when I was ten years old I had some sort of a sonogram done to check out my chest to see if I had a heart murmur. But I didn’t. I do not now, nor have I ever had a heart murmur. Well cased closed. Or so I thought. Turns out my mother doesn’t qualify as a medical expert and I have to go see a doctor to confirm that I don’t have a heart murmur. Great.

I’ve only gone to the doctor here in Brooklyn once it was after I had an allergic reaction to some fabric softener. The doctor was nice but kind of weird. I’m not entirely sure he got his medical license in this country and, while he was examining me, he appeared to be chewing on a set of home made dentures… with his full set of teeth. Why would this doctor have novelty dentures? And even if he had a good reason, must he chew on them in front of a patient? I don’t care if he did finish top of his class in the most prestigious medical school in all of Turkmenistan, I wanna to see somebody else. So I find a general practitioner who works right across the street from New York Methodist and make an appointment.

I go in and it turns out that though this Doctor does do general practice he’s specializes in gastro. I already have a gastro guy in Brooklyn that I like just fine but as soon as this guy hears me mutter something about my Crohn’s he starts quizzing me about my medication and treatment and how much B12 I have, presently, in my system. I don’t know the answer of the top of my head, so clearly I need blood work done. Great. In the meantime though I figure I might as well have him sign off on my not having a heart murmur.

I feel a little silly about the whole situation that I’ve gotten myself into so I say to him, ‘Doc, I got kind of an embarrassing story…’ Cutting me off he replies, ‘Let me guess, there was this young lady…’ I correct him and explain but now he’s convinced I have VD. More blood work is proscribed and he wants to make a visual inspection of my frank and beans. In fairness he’s a doctor and I can’t recall the last time I’ve had to drop trow, turn and cough so I am probably over due, but I’ve just never grown accustom to a man cupping my balls. Of course lady doctors pose a whole different set of problems when examining the boys, so I guess until the rise of the robots it’s a no win for me.

By the time my boxers are back up to their proper position I had a clean bill of health and no signs of a heart murmur… but he can’t really sign off on that until I get an echocardiogram. Me: ‘Really?’ Him: ‘Yup.’ Me: sigh.

Off I go and this time into the bowls of New York Methodist itself. It’s mostly a fairly new facility, clean lots of doctors and staff running about. The kind of place that initially makes you think you’re lucky to have in your neighborhood- and then you try to find anything in it. I swear to you its like being lost in a MC Escher painting. Twice while trying to navigate the second floor I bumped into Jennifer Connelly running form a bunch of muppets.

I managed to find the blood lab first and the experience was rather painless. I’m not squeamish about blood or needles, but as they wrapped up, I discovered the doc slipped a couple of urine tests onto my form too. I had gone before I left my house but was assured they didn’t need much and sent off to a bathroom. I began to undo my pants when it dawned on me that I was standing in the middle of the room (it was a large one person unisex bathroom) and no where near the toilet. I mean sure, I was going to *try* to pee in the cup but this isn’t something I’m well practiced with. As I head to the toilet I see ample evidence to suggest that though I’m not the first person here to initially make that mistake I may have been the first to correct it as pee is pretty much evenly distributed through out the bathroom. Brooklyn, what!? Whaaat!?

I wrapped up my business and found myself cleaning off the seat despite not having gotten any urine on there myself I just couldn’t accept the idea of someone else thinking I was the culprit. Sometimes I find my good manners really debilitating.

End in sight I head off to cardiology. Or try to. I’m the kind of guy that if I’m only going to go up one flight will take the stairs. Now this is a multi floor building that takes up a whole city block… and apparently has one set of stairs. Every time you think you’ve found stairs what you’ve really found is a fire door… attached to an alarm and you have to turn around.

Luckily for me the rock hearder helped me get past the bog of eternal stench but unluckily for me when I arrived in cardio I found all of the reception windows closed and locked. As I waited there one girl returned to her seat at the window with a sandwich but when she saw me waiting turned away and laughed. I will grant you that I was not in a life or death situation and she could probably surmise as much from the fact I wasn’t strapped to a gurney, and will further grant you that I know what its like dealing with people and how sometimes you really need to take your break… but why didn’t she lower the blinds on her damn window?

I followed a woman in a wheel chair and using an oxygen tank past the close doors and found someone in the office. I let the woman with the oxygen tank go first because it seemed kinda menschy and also like her thing may have been time sensitive. When my turned rolled up I found myself being lectured because the woman who initially admitted me to the blood lab had omitted one character when she entered my health insurance information. The lecture centered on a theme that I needed to take responsibility and not let that sort of thing happen. Which was embarrassing because ordinarily I love criticizing health professionals on their job performance immediately before they jab me with needles. It just… it makes me feel alive, you know?

Finally I’m in the cardio waiting room. They have a TV on playing Law & Order and I’m wondering if I should try to sneak a nap in while wait when a middle aged Asian lady wearing a lab coat pokes her head in and asks if I can wait ten minutes. Seems reasonable. Me: ‘Sure.’

About a quarter of the way into the second episode of Law & Order a black man in a lab coat steps into the waiting room and I stand up to follow him. He sits down and says, ‘Mind if I take my break in here?’ Me: ‘Sure.’ So he settles in and casts his eyes up to the TV… here’s the thing though, its one of those really old episodes of Law & Order from the early 90’s with Chris North as one of the detectives. The show got better in later years but when it first started out the episodes would frequently have a very un-artful theme. This episode’s theme was affirmative action.

Had the topic been more intelligently handled it wouldn’t have been even slightly awkward for the two of us strangers sitting in a waiting room but instead every single white character was parroting these bizarre straw-man arguments against affirmative action that basically amounted to, ‘Fuck’em,’ and as if this wasn’t bad enough here’s the title and summary of the episode from NBC: RAGE
‘A successful white stockbroker is found dead of a broken neck. His coworkers immediately point the finger at "golden boy" Bud Greer -- a young, black junior trader. Bud tells Logan and Briscoe that success isn't about money, it's about power and with his major competitor dead, Bud now has the power. When Bud pleads insanity due to "black rage" the ADAs don't buy it for a second. Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) guest stars.’
They threw in a little lip service here and there but in a nutshell the episode basically said, ‘Affirmative action is bad because people’s racist suspicions are probably right.’ Comedy Central won’t play the scientology episode of South Park but this crap is still on the air. Wow. Thanks TNT. You know Drama.

Eventually I was called in by the Asian woman whom I learned was Chinese. She was pleasant enough but as the exam got started and I lay on my back willing my heart to beat as regular as a metronome so I could just get my teeth cleaned it became clear that this too would be an ordeal. Apparently half the department had been laid off and their overtime hours cut. This meant that people were constantly bursting into the room and flicking on the lights or that she had to shout instructions into the next room in her broken English.

As we wrapped up I asked her, ‘So does everything seem normal?’ ‘Oh, I can’t say.’ Which was really my fault, I just assumed because she was operating an echocardiogram everyday of her life for 8 hours a day and had just been staring at my heart and making all kinds of graphs of my heart beat she would be able to tell me something as simple as, ‘Yes it looks normal,’ or, ‘No, you need more tests.’ This of course is wrong. She just operates the machine someone else, in a monument to efficiency, interprets the data.

So by the time I returned home, I had been called dumb by my mother, lost in a hospital, poked with a needle, fondled by an old man, experienced liberal white guilt and even cleaned up somebody else’s pee. I had not, however, had my teeth cleaned.